Our Child and Adolescent Mental Health MSc is a multidisciplinary course which will develop your understanding of child development and mental health difficulties experienced by children and adolescents. The course provides a critical platform to explore the diverse and lived experiences of children, young people and their families. You will use your developed theory and experience to explore the socio-cultural context through which children and young people experience distress.

This course is taught by practitioners and academics from various backgrounds, including but not limited to: mental health, education, counselling, therapeutic work, speech and language-offering a diverse range of perspectives.

The course is intended to develop your specific mental health knowledge and skills in a range of backgrounds and perspectives, to enable you to work more effectively with children and young people. It will also provide you with the theoretical underpinning to better understand the nature of children and young people’s distress, as well as some broad practical skills. The foundational aim of the course is to explore children and young peoples lives, and what may contribute to the traumas, difficulties and challenges that they experience on a day-to-day basis.

Students who enter the course with a profession use the course to specialise their knowledge and/or increase their opportunities for progression within their own organisations. The course is also popular for students who have recently finished an undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline, and are looking to provide a firmer academic foundation for future applications in CAMHs and related services.  The diversity of the cohort is a key benefit of the course and its group culture, providing all students with many opportunities to reflect on their own practice, experiences, backgrounds and presumptions around mental health.

In an increasingly competitive market, a postgraduate qualification is positioned as an essential requirement for working with children, young people and their families. MSc CAMH students have entered into a variety of positions from education (e.g. Assistant SENCo), therapeutic/intervention work (e.g. Therapeutic Care Worker, Intense Support Worker etc.), self-created opportunities (e.g. founding of new support/education organisations in their country of origin) and further study (e.g. Clinical Doctorates, PhD Study, Mental Health Nursing, Teacher Training, IAPT). The course outcomes are not limited to a single thought of study, and therefore the opportunities are diverse upon completion.

This course will provide you with opportunities to engage in critical and reflective practice, encouraging you to explore the diverse worlds of children and young people. Research methods and the development of academic skills are integral to the course. Course tutors prioritise the facilitation of a supportive environment through which you will develop both personally and professionally, within the MSc CAMH community.